High Water

How Presidents and citizens react to disaster.

On September 10, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson had lunch in the Roosevelt Room—the “Fish Room,” as F.D.R. called it—with several aides and half a dozen ambassadors of modest-sized countries. Then he returned to the Oval Office for a routine round of meetings and telephone calls—a fairly ordinary, crowded day amid the growing crisis of the war in Vietnam. At 2:36 p.m., according to copies of Johnson’s daily diaries, the President took a call from Senator Russell Long, of Louisiana. The day before, Hurricane Betsy had made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Storm gusts were up to a hundred and sixty miles an hour, and in New Orleans levees had been breached, causing much of the city to flood overnight, especially the neighborhoods of Bywater, Pontchartrain Park, and the largely black and impoverished Ninth Ward. The Army Corps of Engineers later reported as many as eighty-one deaths, a quarter-million people evacuated, and water levels of up to nine feet. Hurricane Betsy was the worst disaster to strike New Orleans since the cholera epidemic of 1849 and the yellow-fever epidemic of 1905.

Russell Long, the son of Huey Long and an old friend of Johnson’s in the Senate, had a simple goal. He wanted to convince the President of the urgency of the crisis and have him come immediately to Louisiana. Their conversation is rich with emotional and political manipulation. Long made it clear to Johnson that to delay, or to send a subordinate, could easily have consequences in the 1968 election:

Senator Long: Mr. President, aside from the Great Lakes, the biggest lake in America is Lake Pontchartrain. It is now drained dry. That Hurricane Betsy picked the lake up and put it inside New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, the Third [Congressional] District. . . . If I do say it, our people are just like . . . It’s like my home—The whole damn home’s been destroyed, but that’s all right. My wife and kids are still alive, so it’s O.K. Mr. President, we have really had it down there, and we need your help.

President Johnson: All right. You got it.

Long: Well, now, if I do say it . . . we’ve lost only one life so far. Why we haven’t lost more I can’t say. . . . For example, that damn big four-hundred-year-old tree fell on top of my house. My wife and kids were, thank God, in the right room. So we’re still alive. I don’t need no federal aid. But, Mr. President, my people—Oh, they’re in tough shape. . . . If I do say it, you could elect Hale Boggs and every guy you’d want to elect in the path of this hurricane just by handling yourself right.

Now, if you want to go to Louisiana right now— You lost that state last year. You could pick it up just like looking at it right now by going down there as the President just to see what happened. . . . Just go, and say, “My God, this is horrible! . . . These federally constructed levees that Hale Boggs and Russell Long built is the only thing that saved five thousand lives.” See now, if you want to do that you can do it right now. Just pick one state up like looking at it—you lost it last time. If you’d do that you’d sack them up. [Louisiana congressman] Ed Willis is sitting on this telephone and he knows like I do that all you’ve got to do is just make a generous gesture, he’d get reëlected, a guy that’s for you.

Johnson: Russell, I sure want to. I’ve got a hell of a two days that I’ve got scheduled. Let me look and see what I can back out of and get into and so on and so forth and let me give you a ring back. If I can’t go, I’ll put the best man I got there.

Long: So now listen, we are not the least bit interested in your best man. . . . I’m just a Johnson man. Let’s—

Johnson: I know that. I know that.

Long: . . . Just make it a stopover. . . . You go to Louisiana right now, land at Moisant Airport. [Imagining a news story] “The President was very much upset about the horrible destruction and damage done to this city of New Orleans, lovely town. The town that everybody loves.” If you go there right now, Mr. President, they couldn’t beat you if Eisenhower ran.

Johnson: Um-hmm. Let me think about it and call you back.

Johnson hung up. He met with Bill Moyers, Larry O’Brien, J. Edgar Hoover, and others. He accepted an award from the leaders of the World Convention of Churches of Christ. Then, at 5:03 p.m., he boarded a helicopter on the South Lawn, and it ferried him to Andrews Air Force Base. From there the President—along with Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs, the key congressional powers in Louisiana, and officials from the Red Cross and the Army Corps of Engineers—flew to New Orleans on Air Force One. “The President spent a good deal of the time talking w/ Senator Long and Cong. Hale Boggs during the flight,” the diary says. “Also worked in his bedroom w/ [his assistants] on mail that had been taken on the flight. Afterwards, the President napped for about 30 minutes before arrival in New Orleans.”

Even at the airport, Johnson began to get a sense of the damage wrought by Betsy. “Parts of the roofing of the terminal were torn away and several of the large windows were broken,” the diary reads. “The members of the Presidential party had seen from the air a preview of the city—water over 3/4 of the city up to the eaves of the homes, etc.” At the urging of the mayor of New Orleans—a diminutive conservative Democrat named Victor Hugo Schiro, whom Johnson referred to as “Little Mayor”—the President decided to tour the flooded areas. His motorcade stopped on a bridge spanning the Industrial Canal, in the eastern part of the city, and from there the Presidential party saw whole neighborhoods engulfed by floods. They could see, according to the diary, that “people were walking along the bridge where they had disembarked from the boats that had brought them to dry land. Many of them were carrying the barest of their possessions and many of them had been sitting on top of their houses waiting for rescue squads to retrieve the families and carry them to dry land.” Johnson talked with a seventy-four-year-old black man named William Marshall and asked about what had happened and how he was getting along. As the conversation ended, Marshall said, “God bless you, Mr. President. God ever bless you.”

In the Ninth Ward, Johnson visited the George Washington Elementary School, on St. Claude Avenue, which was being used as a shelter. “Most of the people inside and outside of the building were Negro,” the diary reads. “At first, they did not believe that it was actually the President.” Johnson entered the crowded shelter in near-total darkness; there were only a couple of flashlights to lead the way.

“This is your President!” Johnson announced. “I’m here to help you!”

The diary describes the shelter as a “mass of human suffering,” with people calling out for help “in terribly emotional wails from voices of all ages. . . . It was a most pitiful sight of human and material destruction.” According to an article by the historian Edward F. Haas, published fifteen years ago in the Gulf Coast Historical Review, Johnson was deeply moved as people approached and asked him for food and water; one woman asked Johnson for a boat so that she could look for her two sons, who had been lost in the flood.

“Little Mayor, this is horrible,” Johnson said to Schiro. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” Johnson assured Schiro that the resources of the federal government were at his disposal and that “all red tape [will] be cut.”

The President flew back to Washington and the next day sent Schiro a sixteen-page telegram outlining plans for aid and the revival of New Orleans. “Please know,” Johnson wrote, “that my thoughts and prayers are with you and the thousands of Louisiana citizens who have suffered so heavily.”

Hurricane Katrina was more devastating than Betsy. The death toll is sure to be many times as high and the physical damage far more extensive and enduring. And yet to see the city of New Orleans a week after the flood, to see the ruin, was to be shocked much as Johnson was forty years ago. New Orleans is never abandoned easily. Driving along St. Charles Avenue, through toxic puddles that once belonged to the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, you saw a painted sign on a door reading, “Still here. Cooking a pot of dog gumbo.” Another, next to a branch of the Whitney National Bank, read, “I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer.” By the time Hurricane Rita had reflooded parts of the city, there was almost no one left in town.

The last holdouts, especially the poorest among them, wore a look of delirium. They seemed to sense that to leave now, with no savings, with no resources, meant to leave forever. On a desolate corner in the Ninth Ward, I sat on a curb with an old woman who had been refusing rescue for more than a week. She wore a soiled housedress. She was very old and could not have weighed more than seventy-five pounds. “I’ll be here to the end,” she said. There was a bottle of warm beer in a paper bag at her feet. She didn’t drink from it. She was just dazed by the sun and the heat and the emptiness of her street. She was firm in her belief that all her neighbors, now in shelters in Lafayette, Houston, Pensacola, God knows where, were the lost ones. “Plain fools,” she said. The street smelled of low tide in a tidal swamp. She said, “They’re jealous of me. I got forty-four dollars’ worth of meat in that icebox inside, and they ain’t gonna take it from me. Nobody gonna lock me out of my home.”

Although there were no looters now and very few residents, the streets were still being patrolled in fantastic numbers by—and this is a random sampling—the New Orleans Police, New Orleans swat teams, the New York City Police Department, the Sacramento Fire Department, the Greenbelt, Maryland, police, private Blackwater security contractors, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the 82nd Airborne, National Guardsmen, San Diego lifeguards, Surf Zone Relief Operations, and, in yellow T-shirts, Scientology Disaster Response teams. The Scientologists pitched a tent outside Harrah’s Casino with a sign reading “Something Can Be Done About It,” and offered massage “assists” to the police.

Eddie Compass, the superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, was holding court in front of Harrah’s. I got to know Compass years ago, when he was an up-and-comer in the department, and Jack Maple, who helped set the New York department right in the early Giuliani administration, came down as a paid consultant for the N.O.P.D. Maple was a natural for New Orleans; he was his own Mardi Gras float. He was fat and funny and wore a homburg, spectator shoes, and sharp suits, and smoked a huge Mexican cigar. In many American cities, the combination of tech-era prosperity and the sort of innovative policing techniques that Maple had helped to develop were driving crime rates down. Yet Maple, like so many consultants before him, could do little about the poverty and corruption in New Orleans. He died a couple of years ago, and now Eddie Compass, who has barely aged, was saying that he missed him. “We could use the Fat Man now,” he said. “Everything else we tried failed.” Five hundred of his officers—roughly thirty per cent—did not initially report in the crisis. “Either they went home to take care of their families, went missing, or, God forbid, worse.” Two of his officers, including his spokesman, committed suicide during the flooding. The jails, like everything else, weren’t functional, and he was keeping nearly two hundred prisoners—looters, mainly—in a makeshift lockup in the local Amtrak station. At first, Compass had no help. Now the streets were so militarized—and so depopulated—that the city resembled a war zone with no enemy.

“Right now,” he said, “New Orleans may be the single safest city in the United States.”

Hurricane Katrina destroyed the structures, comforts, and protections of civilization, and the poorer you were, the more exposed you were to high water. Stripped of electricity, air-conditioning, medicine, safety, food, clean water, doctors, transport, firm ground—stripped of everything that seemed necessary to live in New Orleans—people were left with a gesture of political correctness. Within a day of the bowl of the city filling, TV commentators had instructed viewers that the people fleeing town were under no circumstances to be called refugees: “These are Americans!” Not Bosnians, not Kosovars, not Bangladeshis—Americans. And yet, of all the New Orleanians I met—in the city, or in the Cajundome, in Lafayette, in downtown Baton Rouge, in the churches and parks of New Iberia, at the Astrodome in Houston—none gave a damn for the terminology. They’d fled danger and now they were homeless, with few prospects or none at all.

At a house where I was spending the night, I sat out on the porch until early morning listening on a transistor radio to the most powerful signal on the airwaves: WWL, 870 AM. It was a strangely efficient way of scanning the misery that had hit the Gulf Coast. The host was Garland Robinette, a sonorous broadcaster with a long history in town as a television anchor. Robinette’s show was a catchall for rumors, the debunking of rumors, interviews, speculation, and a kind of regional disaster therapy.

“The people of the Allstate National Catastrophe Team are standing by at 1-800-54-STORM.”

“Ray from Houma” called to say that at Louis Armstrong Airport two people posing as fema officers were telling people they had to pay fifteen dollars each to get on any buses leaving New Orleans. People traded information about gas, electricity, food supplies, and rental properties throughout the South. There were news bulletins: the floodwaters are highly contagious, contaminated with E. coli, rotting flesh, spilled petroleum. Washington is sending fifty-two billion dollars. Watch out for fake Web-site charities: there are “so many the F.B.I. can’t keep up with them.” Here’s how to get generators and chainsaws from John Deere. Here’s how to begin filing insurance claims.

A few days after the storm, WWL joined in a consortium of rival stations to form United Broadcasters of New Orleans, and they were now reaching thirty-eight states and thirteen countries. The moment that brought WWL the most attention was Robinette’s interview with Mayor Ray Nagin while people were still trapped in the Superdome and in the Convention Center, and Washington, particularly the White House, seemed to be on extended summer vacation. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, President Bush was slow to respond to the emergency—so slow, in fact, that his staff felt compelled to prepare a DVD of network newscasts to impress upon him the scale of the floods, the chaos, and the suffering. “God is looking down on all this,” Nagin said, “and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they’re dying by the hundreds, I’m willing to bet you . . . Don’t tell me forty thousand people are coming here. They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddam crisis in the history of this country.”

One morning, I set out on Interstate 10 for St. Gabriel, a small town fifteen miles south of Baton Rouge, where federal officials had converted a warehouse into a morgue. As rescue workers found more bodies in attics and hospitals and nursing homes, they sent most of them to St. Gabriel. The death toll was a matter of speculation, and yet twenty-five thousand body bags were on their way to Louisiana. On the road, I listened to an interview on WWL with Kathleen Rhodes Astorga, of the Rhodes Funeral Home chain, in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

“We do jazz funerals, celebration-of-life ceremonies, all kinds of funerals,” she said. “We just want it to be with dignity and respect.”

The host lowered his voice to a timbre indicating solemnity and said, “These people have drowned, spent days in the water. Do you, um, think people should just go with your judgment on whether there should be a closed casket and put a picture on it?”

Rhodes agreed. “Thinking closed casket is not a bad idea,” she said.

I pulled up to the St. Gabriel morgue. A fence surrounded the place, and the policeman at the door politely rebuffed any questions. “All I can tell you is nothing,” he said. “And all I can give you is this.” He handed me a sheet of paper:

Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) Process

*As deceased victims are located by local emergency workers and volunteers they are taken to the collection site. A collection site is a place where FEMA DMORT staff collects preliminary information to help identify the victim. Information collected includes:

Address or location of victim

Any documentation associated with victim

GPS coordinates

Personal effects

*From the collection site, they are taken to the Disaster Portable Mortuary Unit (DPMU) with dignity in a very respectful manner utilizing a police escort.

Ordinarily, WWL’s studios are on the fifth floor of Dominion Tower, an office building near the Superdome. But the windows blew in during the storm, and WWL broadcast for a few days from a former waste-disposal plant, in Jefferson Parish. Finally, the station moved its operations to a studio in Baton Rouge. One afternoon, I came by to meet with the news director, Dave Cohen, a man in his thirties who wore a dirty white undershirt and shorts that would soon be better incinerated than washed. Every few minutes, his cell phone would bugle him to attention. His ring tone is “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He’d reach for his hip pocket in a panic. “Yes! This is Dave!” His house, in Metairie, just west of New Orleans, was flooded, but nothing, he said, like the Ninth Ward.

Because his station was the most immediate, moment-to-moment source of information in the region, I asked Cohen how it had felt to be inside the hurricane. “Friday before the storm, we were feeling good,” he said. “The National Hurricane Center said that this would really hit the Florida panhandle, not us. We were barely in the ‘cone of error’ in New Orleans. So I kicked off for the day on Friday at one o’clock and went to the gym. But at around four my pager started going haywire. Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, had changed his prediction. There was a hundred-and-fifty-mile shift to the west.” It was going to be a problem to get people in the city to adjust. “In New Orleans, people go home at lunch on Fridays,” Cohen said. “All year round. And Friday night was a football night. The Ravens were in town to play a preseason game against the Saints at the Superdome. It was also a big high-school football night, the jamboree games, which kick off the season. People were out drinking, having a good time. They were consuming very little media. But by Saturday morning we were told there was mandatory evacuation for Plaquemines Parish, to the southeast, and some coastal areas, though not yet New Orleans. On Saturday, Ray Nagin was still saying that we have time to watch this. A lot of people were clueless. They had no idea there were evacuations.

“We’ve always talked about the worst-case scenarios in Louisiana,” Cohen continued. “They talk about ‘slosh models’—computer-generated models on what would happen. The geography is obvious. If you are walking along the riverfront in downtown New Orleans, you are looking up at the Mississippi River. You look up at Lake Pontchartrain, up at the canals. When the water flows in, you have a city that becomes a tidal lake, with sharks and manatees and all the rest.

“By ten on Saturday night, Nagin was really concerned. He got a call from Max Mayfield saying that he should evacuate the city. And on Sunday morning Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation order. Sunday night, there were gale-force winds. We were told that if you weren’t out by now it was too late, that—and this was the quote—‘preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.’ We were broadcasting all of Sunday night. The power went out in the city. The eye of the storm wasn’t even near us, but our windows in the downtown studio started cracking. And on Monday morning, while Garland Robinette was on the air, the windows blew in.

“Landfall was at 6 a.m. on the coast,” he went on. “We feared that it would get to New Orleans at exactly 90 longitude, 30 latitude, and it got to 89.6. At 1 a.m., it went due north, and it felt like Christmas had come early. It was staying at 89.6 at 2, 3, 4 a.m. with one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour winds, but still it did not look like the worst-case scenario. Roofs were flying off houses, cars moved around in the wind, there were rapids in the streets, but still . . . On Monday night, there were reports that water was coming over the Seventeenth Street canal, which separates Orleans Parish and Jefferson Parish, to the west. The water was coming over in the dark. The levee itself is in Lakeview, an upscale lakefront neighborhood near where I-10 and I-610 split. At six in the morning, we were told that the levee had been ripped apart and water was pouring in. I went on the radio and said that eyewitnesses had said ‘The bowl is filling.’ So I said, ‘Get out if you are to the east of the Seventeenth Street canal. That’s the whole city. It’s as bad as the Mississippi River breaking through. Lake Pontchartrain is emptying into the city of New Orleans. The water is rising and it’s not going to stop. Get out now.’

“We started getting amazing phone calls: a woman in her house with a two-year-old on one shoulder, a five-year-old at her side, no formula, no food, ‘What do I do?’ And what can I tell her? I’m just a guy on the radio!”

Like so many other news people in town, Dave Cohen had been preparing forty-years-later reports on Hurricane Betsy when Katrina hit. Although L.B.J. and the local officials of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana responded to their crisis with far greater coördination and speed than their successors in 2005, the memories of Betsy remain bitter, and not only because of the suffering and destruction it caused. As Edward Haas has made clear, Betsy was followed within days by widespread rumors that Mayor Schiro had ordered floodwater pumped out of his own well-to-do subdivision, Lake Vista, and into the Ninth Ward. At the time of the flood, Schiro was in a race for reëlection with another Democrat, the city council president, James E. Fitzmorris, Jr. There were also stories that he had ordered the levees breached. Thomas E. Allen, of Hunt Foods & Industries, an ally of the Mayor’s, wrote to him to say that two of his African-American servants “brought this tale to my wife yesterday and said that all of the Negroes were talking about it and were angry with you about it.” Haas quotes Schiro’s secretary, Marguerite Guette, who told the Mayor, “An old 71-years of age colored man by the name of Williams, who says you have helped him all of his life and who lives at 2630 Republic Street, called to say that he is very concerned about a rumor that is going around that may ruin you with colored voters. The rumor is that you cut the Industrial Canal to drown the colored people so that they would not vote in the coming election.” An aide to the Mayor later reported that people claiming to be relief workers and Schiro supporters delivered bags of “supplies” to flood victims in the Ninth Ward. People opened the bags only to find spoiled food and soiled, useless clothing.

Four years ago, a play staged in New Orleans called “An Evening with Betsy” explored the old conspiracy rumors. And although among historians Schiro earns high marks for his handling of the flood (if not for his obstinate views on race), the rumors persist. “That theory is why older people in the Ninth Ward still keep hatchets in their attics,” Dave Cohen had told me. “They remember what it was like to be trapped, with the water rising and no way to get to the roof.”

The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act.

In the town of New Iberia, south of Lafayette, a few hundred New Orleanians, nearly all of them African-American, were staying at a gym on the grounds of West End Park. It was dusk when I arrived, and people were wandering around the athletic field, shooing away clouds of mosquitoes, drinking bottles of cold water provided by the Red Cross, and recounting for each other, yet again, their exodus stories. “Biblical proportions”—everyone used that phrase, and why not? I went inside and noticed a couple of signs: “This is Our Home. Please Respect Us.” “Evacuees and Volunteers Only Beyond This Point: Curfew 730, Lights Out 10, TV off at 10:30.” Two of the Red Cross volunteers who had organized the shelter and were keeping it running told me that they had been at Ground Zero in New York four years ago and that, in many ways, this was worse. “A whole city ruined,” one said. “More than a million people leaving their homes.” “Biblical proportions,” the other said.

A friendly man in his late thirties named Walter Hays sat down to talk. Hays is African-American, a Navy veteran who had been working as a fitter at Northrop Grumman. People had painful and fantastical stories to tell—floating a family to safety in an inflatable kiddie pool, nights in the Superdome or on the street, helicopter escapes in the arms of a soldier—and Walter Hays wanted to tell his. He was in New Iberia with a group of twenty-eight close family and friends, including three infants and several small children. The adults had vowed to bring everyone out together. He talked of the beautiful weather the day after the storm, and then, the next day, he said, “the water started coming out of the ground,” rolling down the streets, streaming through the floorboards. In three hours, the water was at chest level. Hays filled an ice chest with papers and the group started out, halting for two days and nights, along with two thousand other souls, on the sweltering Claiborne Avenue overpass, near the Superdome.

“We had with us three-month-old twins, a two-month-old, no water,” he said. “People were pulling guns. What we saw on that overpass was beyond imagining: there were suicides, people jumping off the bridge, older people who couldn’t take it, there were dead bodies floating underneath, the whole overpass reeked of feces and urine. Fights broke out all the time. People tried to jump on whatever military vehicles went by, but of course they wouldn’t let anyone on. There were choppers over our heads. We could see the touch-and-gos of the helicopters—it went on all night long, and no one got any sleep. It was so hot and humid. And the one thing I’ll never forget is that the sky was so clear and full of stars. So clear because there weren’t any lights from the city. And all night long the kids were crying, the adults were crying, old people crying.”

In the days that followed, they made their way to higher ground. A heroin addict they met had been looting, and he gave them water, food, Pampers. He even let them bathe in his house. “And he went on looting,” Hays said. “I can’t really argue. If you’re dealt lemons, you make lemonade.” Walter Hays and the others knew they had to get out of town, but there was still no transport. A police officer told them they should break into cars and see if they could steal one. Hays and his best friend, a grocery-store manager named Chester Pye, went to a nearby bus barn. “A guy there showed me how to hot-wire a school bus. We got our hands all slashed up from pulling wires, and it seemed like all the batteries were dead. Finally, Chester finds a good battery, and we went looking for keys.” They found one that fit bus No. 9322 and picked up the rest of the extended family and headed out of town. Along the way, near the Fisher housing project, in Algiers, someone shot at the bus and demanded to be let on, but there was no room. They kept going west on Route 90, getting as far as Houma, Louisiana. On the road to New Iberia, a police officer pulled them over. “I was scared,” Hays went on. “After all, we’d boosted the bus. The cop, a white guy, looked inside and saw it wasn’t hot-wired. There was a key. And what did he do? He gave us a police escort and called another police escort as we left Raceland and we got the escort all the way to New Iberia. And in New Iberia an officer said to me, and I will remember this forever, he said, ‘I want you to understand something. You think this is the end of life as you know it for you. But this is a new beginning. You have a lot of people pulling for you.’ ”

Walter Hays had been telling his story for a couple of hours, with many other details of disasters averted and kindnesses provided. By now many of his friends had gathered around him, adding clarifications and saying that, all in all, they were blessed.

“All along the way, things were strategically placed in our way by the Lord,” Hays said, in agreement. “The dopehead who helped us, the bus key, the people in Houma, wading through the water, the bodies, the tiny infants who made it out, sleeping on the bridge, like it was a terrible desert. It’s Biblical, isn’t it? After everything we’ve been through, if you aren’t changed morally, spiritually, then you are dead inside.”

And then, just at the point where the story seemed over, with a flourish of amens and thank-the-Lords, Tyrell Pye, Chester’s nephew, said, “Now, just remember.” He paused and lowered his gaze at me. “Remember,” he said, “this was a premeditated disaster. They flooded the city. It happened on a pretty, sunshiny day, two days of rising water. You tell me: where the rich people at?”

And Chester Pye said, “How come the Seventeenth Street levee broke? It’s a totally poor area. And once the water started coming to St. Bernard Parish it was Oops, maybe we should start doing something?” The others nodded. They agreed with this no less than they agreed on the saving grace of God.

Except Walter Hays. He was unsure. “I just don’t know about any of that,” he said.

When I asked Chester Pye if he and his family would return to New Orleans, he said, “There’s no reason to go back now. Back to what? Back as a tourist? The new New Orleans is going to be like Six Flags Bourbon Street, you know what I mean?”

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.” For most, it hardly seemed to matter that some wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, did not escape damage.

At the Houston Astrodome, for instance, people made statements and asked questions that mixed the logical with the conspiratorial.

“Where were the buses?”

“Why is it, do you think, that the French Quarter and the Garden District are high and dry and the Ninth is flooded and gonna get bulldozed?”

“In Betsy I know the mayor blew up the levee to save those big homes on the lakefront. A lot of people believe that, especially the people who were on their roofs!”

“I couldn’t leave. I was terrified. I didn’t have any money, no car, nothing. Where was I supposed to go? They shoulda had some buses. It’s me and my five kids. I live in Desire, the Ninth Ward. I think it was a setup to get black folks out of New Orleans forever. Look around. Who’s here? Nobody but the black and the poor. They ain’t got but ten white families in the whole Astrodome.”

“This came from a higher power, the alpha and the omega.”

At the Reliant Center, in Houston, Patricia Valentine, a fifty-four-year-old woman from Treme, a black neighborhood near the French Quarter, told me that her area was “waist high” in water and the restaurants down the street “got nothing.” She was sitting in a wheelchair and said that she had no intention of returning home. “They can have New Orleans,” she said. “It’s a toxic-waste dump now. I was in Betsy forty years ago: September, 1965. And the levee broke. What are we, stupid? Born yesterday? It’s the same people drowning today as back then. They were trying to move us out anyway. They want a bigger tourist attraction, and we black folks ain’t no tourist attraction.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

Lolis Eric Elie, an African-American columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, told me he didn’t believe that the levees were blown deliberately—“and most black folks with some education or money don’t, either”—but he could “easily” understand why so many were suspicious. “Blacks, in a state of essential slavery, built those very levees that were blown up in 1927. When the ships came to rescue people, whites made damn sure not to rescue blacks in Mississippi because of their fear that the blacks wouldn’t return to work the farms. If black life is not valued—and isn’t that what you were seeing for days in New Orleans?—then the specifics of the explanations are irrelevant. You begin to say to yourself, ‘How do you aid tsunami victims instantly and only three or four days later get to New Orleans? What explanation other than race can there be?’ I believe the real explanation is manifold, but I can understand how people start believing these things.”

In Washington, whites dismissed The Plan as part of the “pathology” of poverty. Nevertheless, in D.C. and other cities, legends of conspiracy persisted as the counter-narrative to the conventional view of inexorable progress and the growing black middle class. Many in the population left behind could believe almost anything: that aids had been concocted in government laboratories as part of an anti-black conspiracy; that the government distributed crack in black neighborhoods as a genocidal practice; that the Klan has ownership interests in Church’s Chicken, Kool cigarettes, and Tropical Fantasy soft drinks and uses them all to damage the health, and even sterilize, African-Americans; that between 1979 and 1981 the F.B.I. took part in a string of murders of black children in Atlanta. Scholars such as Patricia Turner, at the University of California, the author of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” have written extensively on the role of rumor and conspiracy theory in the African-American community, especially among the poor (and also on the phenomenon of wild rumors about blacks among whites), and they make a convincing case that these counter-narratives emerge from decades of institutional racism and from particular episodes in American history, such as the use of hundreds of poor African-Americans, between 1932 and 1972, as lab rats in U.S. government trials, known as the Tuskegee experiments, on the effects of syphilis.

John Barry, in “Rising Tide,” his book about the 1927 flood, quotes a New York Times account of a levee breach in Washington County, Mississippi, in 1912. An engineer who had run out of sandbags “ordered . . . several hundred negroes . . . to lie on top of the levee and as close together as possible. The black men obeyed, and although the spray frequently dashed over them, they prevented the overflow that might have developed into an ugly crevasse. For an hour and a half this lasted, until the additional sandbags arrived.” The Times called the idea “brilliant.”

New Orleans was sixty-seven per cent African-American at the time of Katrina. It always had a substantial black population—it was one of the leading slave markets—and decades of migration starting at the time of Reconstruction made it even larger. The city was, in per-capita terms, the wealthiest in America before the Civil War and the wealthiest in the South until the nineteen-twenties. No more. Few of the improvements in urban America—the growth of the black middle class, the decline of the murder rate, greater attention to inner-city schools—have taken firm hold in New Orleans. There is hardly any industrial base, no major corporate headquarters, no home-grown businesses on the scale of FedEx in Memphis, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, the Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville. Colonel Terry Ebbert, the head of Homeland Security in the city, told me, “Drugs are the biggest business in town, bigger than tourism.” Small wonder that at school-board meetings of Orleans Parish parents may think the worst—for example, that magnet schools are part of an over-all plan of educational disenfranchisement. Small wonder that they might believe that the break in the levees was a plot.

“Perception is reality, and their reality is terrible,” Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times-Picayune, said. “We are talking about people who are very poor and have a precondition to accept this belief. Lots are cut off from mainstream news and information. They are isolated in shelters and they know a thing or two about victimization. It fits well into a system of belief.”

In 1900, after a hurricane killed thousands in Galveston, Texas, the city died as a port and the rise of the port of Houston began. After the floods of 1927, John Barry writes, the city fathers of New Orleans began their long decline into insular stagnation, Huey Long rose to power as governor of Louisiana, and Herbert Hoover, who led the rescue program, was elected President.

Catastrophe and displacement is not a subject only for the history books. The fate of a city can change in a single turn of the weather. According to polls, huge numbers of people now living in shelters say they will not go back to New Orleans. Few have insurance policies or even bank accounts, credit cards, or savings sufficient to start over. Many of them are sick or unemployed. As Hurricane Rita bore down on Texas last week, there were still roughly a hundred and fifty thousand evacuees in Houston alone. A poll conducted jointly by the Washington Post, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation showed that fewer than half the evacuees in shelters will move back, and there was nothing in my days of conversations in Houston, New Iberia, Lafayette, and elsewhere that made that figure seem exaggerated.

Kalamu ya Salaam told me that he thought the suffering was far from over. Hurricane Rita has made recovery even more difficult. For the moment, people are focussed on the grace of their own survival, and are grateful for the small and large acts of compassion that have come their way. And yet, he said, “you are going to see a lot of suicides this winter. A lot of poor people depend entirely on their extended family and their friends who share their condition to be a buffer against the pain of that condition. By winter, a lot of the generosity and aid that’s been so palpable lately will begin to slow down and the reality of not going home again will hit people hard. They will be very alone.

“People forget how important all those Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs are for people. It’s a community for a lot of folks who have nothing. Some people have never left New Orleans. Some have never seen snow. So you wake up and you find yourself beyond the reach of friends, beyond the reach of members of your family, and you are working in a fast-food restaurant in Utah somewhere and there is no conceivable way for you to get back to the city you love. How are you going to feel?” ♦

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